The Last September: A Novel

Everything in my life so far had led to this point. If I’d done one thing differently—slept an hour later last Sunday, voiced a complaint I’d suppressed four years before, worn my hair up instead of down on a Friday night. If I hadn’t picked up those books yesterday afternoon, or made love to Charlie the first night I met him. Certainly if I’d never known Eli: this morning would have played out differently, if it had ever occurred at all.

THE FIRST THING I saw were the bottoms of his feet, close together but flayed out in V formation. They looked calloused and dirty—Charlie’s long, bony feet, tough enough to traverse the rocky bluff without sandals.

Behind me, a spectral and disturbing noise: Eli, beginning to weep. My flip-flops thwacked across the deck. A chickadee let out its seven-note cry. My body operated in jerky, oafish movements and I tripped over Charlie’s hammer. I looked down to see blood and hair caked on its claw and kicked it aside with instinctive revulsion.

“Brett,” Eli yelled from the lawn. “Is he still there?” The question, his voice, was still tinged with weeping. And I knew I would have to answer eventually, because we were in this together. The three of us.

Charlie’s eyes stared wide, a glassy and expressionless blue. Not surprised or wounded—simply vacated. His jaw had fixed into a rodentlike and grossly uncharacteristic overbite. Blood and what may have been bone matted his curls against the left side of his head. But what caused the most blood—still wet enough to soak through the knees of my jeans as I knelt beside him—was an injury I didn’t understand: his throat, slit wide open. For a moment, I mistook the gash for the leather shoelace he’d tied there yesterday; but the makeshift necklace was gone, in its place this crude and horrible injury.

Charlie. I pressed my hands over the wound on his neck as if I could staunch the blood, but it was cold as yesterday’s coffee. I scrunched my nose against the scent of minced garlic.

“Brett,” Eli called again. “Do you see him?”

“Yes,” I said, surprised at the clear, unshaking way my voice carried. “He’s still here.”

“Is he dead?”

I couldn’t answer, I couldn’t say it. It must have been shock. Even in that moment, the word formed in my head, shock, and I knew it as the cause of this strange emptiness. I also knew my responsibility as first person to arrive on the scene. Charlie had no carotid artery left, so I pressed my thumb against his wrist, searching for a pulse.

“He’s alive,” I lied, my voice raised in that unnatural calm. “You better stay back.”

I looked down to Charlie’s feet and then to his shoulders, trying to ascertain whether I could pick him up and carry him to the car. I put one hand under his ruined neck, one hand under his waist. We used to joke about my being strong enough to piggyback him. He would climb up onto my back and I would pitch forward, staggering under his full weight. Once I hurt my knee, hauling him up a slope on Mount Washington. When we got back to our hotel, Charlie had fixed me a drink and an ice pack. I’d elevated my knee on his lap, and we laughed at the ridiculousness of my injury. Now my hand sloshed against the slickness under his neck, and his head slapped against the deck as if I’d broken something. My body let out a noise—a whooshing gust of air. The sound of panic surprised me; my brain hadn’t yet recognized my body’s terror.

“Brett,” Eli called again, his voice agitated but oddly normal, as if I were taking too long bringing him a beer. “What’s going on?”